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Battlefield 1 marks the fifteenth installment to EA's multiplayer military shooter franchise and the first one to be inspired by historic events surrounding World War I, opening the door to classic warfare we've yet to see such as trench clubs and a cavalry class.

Similar to previous entries in the series, Battlefield 1 has a fun but brief single-player campaign that serves more as a tutorial for the game's online multiplayer, which should be particularly polished this time around considering an multi-platform open beta was available for weeks ahead of release and drew over 13 million players.

Such an active participation level so early on pointed toward an upcoming success and that indeed appears to be the case judging by reviews, with the game currently getting an aggregated rating of 86/100 according to critics from around the web.

We were among the initial testers and the BF1 beta admittedly made a strong first impression with great graphics that weren't overly demanding. At the time it seemed like entry-level PC gaming gear could tackle this title at 1080p using reasonably high quality settings, so we're keen to see if the full retail version is still as hardware-friendly as we remember.

After testing 41 graphics cards and 20 processors in our Gears of War 4 performance review, we wanted to do the same for Battlefield 1 and for the most part we succeeded, though it hasn't been without a few frustrations.

The biggest annoyance was by far EA's Origin client piracy protection method which limits an account to five hardware changes per day, meaning we could only test five graphics cards per account in a 24-hour period.

Using a single account, it would have taken at least eight days to do the GPU testing that we wanted and probably another eight to complete the CPU benchmarks. In the end we purchased this game three times and it still took five days to get all the results recorded. Anyway, with that nightmare behind us we can move on to the benchmarks (or our companion gameplay review, if that's why you're here).

Testing Methodology

Our benchmark pass lasted 60 seconds, we started at the beginning of the "Through Mud & Blood" story where you take command of a British Mark 5 Tank. This test features plenty of AI-controlled characters and more importantly an easy to follow path that allowed us to repeatedly reproduce the test with a high degree of accuracy.

Since the game appears to be well optimized, we didn't find it necessary to test many quality presets and instead focused on including every graphics card we had on hand. We tested three standard resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K.

The 'Ultra' preset was used though a few tweaks were made to the settings. First, the "GPU Memory Restriction" option was turned off to avoid downscaling when the graphics cards VRAM is maxed out. The FOV was also increased from the default 50 setting to 80, including inside vehicles.